News releases

NEWFORMA ANNOUNCES NEW SOLUTION FOR AECO MARKET
Newforma Project Center™ Delivers “Project Glue” for Building and Infrastructure Projects

MANCHESTER, NH - June 1, 2006 - Newforma, Inc., a software company serving the architectural, engineering, construction, and owner/operator (AECO) industry, today announced Newforma Project Center™, a solution designed to help project managers and team members gain control over their burgeoning and complex project information. AECO project managers, charged with on-time and on-budget project delivery, suffer the brunt of issues arising from having to manage and share project information, where a change, if not communicated on a timely basis, can result in substantial waste, rework, cost increases, and delays. The Newforma solution addresses this problem by reducing barriers to information sharing and increasing the speed with which project information can be located and applied to project process. In the words of early customers, Newforma Project Center is the “project glue” that frees project managers from time-wasting tasks and productivity-draining obstacles.

“Architects today waste valuable time on the mechanics of organizing and sharing project information when this time would be better spent on project design and execution,” said Dan Mitchell, FAIA and Principal of Mackey Mitchell Associates, an architectural firm headquartered in St. Louis. “Newforma Project Center is about returning this time to busy project managers.”

“To support a growing number of clients and sub consultants efficiently across multiple projects located throughout the Southeast, our project teams are assembled by necessity from across our 14 offices,” said John Watkins, Corporate Production Director and Principal at Jordan, Jones, and Goulding (JJG), a leading engineering firm headquartered in Atlanta. “Newforma Project Center helps our multi-office design teams track issues, share project information, and find the most current project files as effectively as if team members were all located in the same office. We look forward to working with Newforma to shape their solution to further address our project information management and communication needs as more of our teams are electing to manage their projects with Newforma Project Center.”

The Newforma Difference

Although several vendors offer alternative solutions such as project extranets, web-based collaboration sites, or generic information management applications to address the technology issues encumbering the project team, Newforma has taken a different approach. Shaped by two years of market research and product validation from over two hundred customer meetings, Newforma’s approach takes into account four major customer needs heard over and over:

• “Add value to the technologies we currently use; don’t reinvent the wheel.”

• “Don’t overhaul our work processes; just make them easier and more efficient.”

• “Address the problem of information sharing across multiple file formats, multiple applications, and even multiple levels of technology sophistication.”

• “Keep it simple for users and simple for IT in order to accelerate adoption and the realization of value.”

Newforma’s solution delivers a new and unique layer of functionality that reconciles information sources and applications with the realities of real-time project workflow – without duplicating the functions already well-performed by file servers, email and exchange servers, CAD/BIM systems or other design and analysis applications. Newforma Project Center brings order to the volume and complexity of project information by providing a Newforma Indexing and Search capability across all project documents, including emails and their associated attachments. Newforma Project Center facilitates the sharing of information across project team members through a single Newforma Viewer that supports most common AECO-industry file formats and enhances the reuse of project information with additional process-enabling tools. Newforma Project Center can easily coexist with, and add value to, in-place processes and technologies, making the solution easier to adopt and faster to implement. Finally, Newforma Project Center extends the ability to manage and share project information to include external team members though Newforma Info Exchange™, a locally hosted and self administering web services capability that helps team members bypass the file-size limitations of email servers when transferring documents, notifies recipients when published documents are ready for download and logs and tracks transmittals and all file sharing activity.

A Process-Driven Approach

“Our team at Newforma has met with hundreds of decision makers at AECO industry leading firms – listening carefully to their current process-related needs and to the needs they anticipate in the future as they embrace the industry wide shift toward Building Information Modeling,” said Ian Howell, CEO of Newforma. “The result is Newforma Project Center, the first software solution that is solely focused on AECO project process enablement – connecting the right project information to the right project team members with the right enabling functionality at the right time in a project process in order to make project execution more efficient.”

Newforma addresses AECO process enablement with functionality that improves the organization, communication, and enhancement of project information in complete synergy with existing work processes. With Newforma Project Center, some of the most cumbersome project activities and the most frustrating obstacles need no longer be considered “an unavoidable part of the project delivery process.” Examples include:

• Managing Project Email – Provide on-the-fly filing of project-related email with other project information without leaving Microsoft Outlook

• Orienting New Project Team Members – Assemble project data in a way that is organized and searchable for faster assimilation of project history, current issues, and available documentation

• File Sharing and Sending/Receiving Transmittals – Streamline the steps required to collect and attach documents to an email or copy to FTP server, and arrange to notify recipients, log download activity, and manage expiration – all from one form

• Managing Issues to Resolution - Provide a project team view to all high-impact issues, and track issues until resolved

• Tracking Changes for Compliance and/or Quality Control - Automatically identify requested or unintended changes in document revisions

• Expediting Iterative Design – Facilitate sharing of design comments via broadly enabled viewing and markup

• Archiving at Key Project Milestones - Automatically combine email with other project documents for a complete project record that is easily searched at a later date

• Estimating Project Cost and the Impact of Design Changes – Coordinate area, linear, and item-based takeoff with Microsoft Excel functionality to rapidly estimate and quantify the impact of incremental design changes

• Coordinating Space Program Requirements – Coordinate designs with a project’s space program requirements using a space layout overlay integrated with Excel to extract or schedule space definitions and generate exception reports

About Newforma

Newforma is a software company serving architecture, engineering, construction, and owner/operator (AECO) organizations worldwide. Our mission is to develop and market industry-leading software solutions which significantly improve the productivity of the building project team by streamlining work processes, reducing exposure from errors and omissions, improving coordination and communication, increasing cost and quantity visibility, and enabling greater repeatability of project success. Newforma Project CenterTM, our flagship product, creates a more productive environment for Project Managers and the Project Team by organizing project information, facilitating information exchange, and enabling efficient project process. Newforma Project Center is currently implemented on multiple projects in industry-leading AECO firms. For more information on Newforma and Newforma Project Center, visit our website at www.newforma.com.